Archive for the ‘balloon’ Category

Tim, Alex, and I launched a balloon in September of last year. On it, we flew an IR camera, pressure sensor, and a GPS on an Arduino and an APRS tracker.

An IR photograph taken from about 85,000 feet.

The sensors and Arduino getting ready for flight

With this sensor configuration, we were able to get GPS data from above 60,000 feet (at which GPS usually shuts off), and compare this with the pressure sensor we were flying, a BMP085 we bought from sparkfun. The datasheet for this sensor states that it’s rated for pressures as low as 30000 Pascals, or about 30,000 feet above sea level.

Pressure vs. Altitude

However, it seems that it worked for higher altitudes, too. At the highest altitude we reached, 26898 meters, the BMP085 recorded a pressure of 1781 Pa, or about 27350 meters above sea level. So it seems that the BMP085 works at altitudes above 30,000 feet, just not as accurately.

Anyway, now that we had a cheap tracking device, we decided to do what any reasonable people would do: send it into near-space. Or, at least, that was the plan.

So our last balloon cost $800. While $800 is pretty cheap considering what we did, we’re all college students, and we haven’t got that sort of money to spend all of the time. Last launch, we spent over $250 on our tracking system (by the way, an excellent device), some $80+ on our balloon, another $80 on helium, $30 on our radar reflector, and $50 on the parachute.

So we decided to replicate a typical launch, but this time to do it as cheaply as we possibly could. We’ve already got a $50 tracking unit (the i290 cell phone uploading data the sensor.network), so now we just need some way to lift it and make sure it lands safely.

In order to do this, we needed a cheap balloon, a parachute, and a radar reflector.

We built the radar reflector out of aluminium foil and foam, sewed the parachute, and found a cheap, 6′ party balloon. $45 for helium at the local Diddams and we were set.

Just before launch

We launched on December 31st, 2009 from just outside of Los Banos, CA. We inflated the balloon with several pounds of lift, and the balloon rose very quickly. At 641 feet, the phone left cellular coverage and began queuing up GPS readings, ready to send them off when back in cellular range, and all we could do was to wait.

We were periodically checking the internet for tracking information, and about an hour later, we began to get readings back from the balloon. We quickly discovered the the balloon had landed after only going to an altitude of around 6,000 feet (more about this later).

We jumped into our cars and drove to the landing site about 30 miles away.

Alex and Tim standing over the payload after landing.

The payload was in perfect condition, and the i290 phone was still on and reporting data just fine.

Now, about the 6,000 feet: it looks like we cheaped out when buying our balloon. There’s still a bit of contention over this, but it looks like a ‘real’ weather balloon has a higher percentage of latex than that of a party balloon. Our party balloon simply was not designed to expand to the same extent as a weather balloon, and burst at 6000 feet. Really, we should have just gotten a weather balloon — it looks like the small ones are just as cheap as the party balloon we bought ($20).

Oh, and about the code for the phone. I’m not going to release it (at least right now): it’s far too ugly and hackish for me to release to the public. If you email me, I’ll probably send it to you with a long note explaining why it’s no good and you shouldn’t trust it.

If you’ve been following the blog, you’ll know that my friends and I put a balloon into near space. You’ll also know that we didn’t get the payload back immediately.

Well, we’ve got great news; the payload was successfully recovered!

We gathered a team of 3 bicyclists and 5 hikers and went to Henry Coe Park today. The bicyclists made it to the landing site well before us hikers, and they found our payload.

Fortunately, we had some GPS coordinates come in over APRS on Saturday, which made the search much more likely to succeed. The bikers found the payload in a tree.

Considering how far off course the balloon went, it’s remarkable that we were able to recover the thing.

When we got back to the cars, we disassembled the still-intact payload.

Everything was in remarkably good condition, so we took a look at the images; we’ve got 9 gigabytes of photograph; a little under 3000 pictures in total. A SunSPOT in the science payload was also able to record some 600 sensor readings.

We’re totally swamped with sensor readings and photographs, so I can’t post everything here (yet!). I’ve found a few images I consider to be some of our best; I’m still trying to find somewhere to put the rest.

The balloon is still tied to the jeep.

And we're off!

This was very close to the highest altitude we reached.

The entire San Francisco Bay is visible from up here.

I’ve got thousands more, but I’m going to stop uploading for now, until I can find some sort of sane hosting that we all agree on.

I’ll be posting some our sensor data and more pictures later, and hopefully a full breakdown of the project.

My friends and I launched the high-altitude weather balloon today. This morning at 5:00 AM, we set out to drive down to our launch site. A bit of scouting later, and we had found a nice quiet spot to launch. At about 10:15 AM, the fog burned off and we got our balloon off the ground.

Anyway, quite a few things here didn’t go to plan. If you were following me on Twitter, you noticed a few things:

The balloon went North instead of East. We ended up in Henry Coe State Park rather than the central valley, as we had planned. This is an issue because our landing site in Henry Coe is much harder to reach, as the terrain is much more rugged.

The balloon had very little buoyancy. I had thought it would be useful to have the balloon rise slowly so that it could make its way over the hills, but it seems like it was far too slow. We were planning on a 3 hour flight-time and we ended up with something like 5 or 6 hours in the air. I don’t know yet how our experiments and imaging responded to the longer mission.

Telemetry failed to function on the ground. We were relying solely on digipeaters to relay our information to the internet and then to us.

We were not able to recover the payload today. We’ll be looking a bit more closely tomorrow for the payload, and we’re all still quite hopeful that we’ll find the thing.

All in all, it was a very fun experience. Hopefully we’ll recover our payload — stay tuned for updates.